Ms. Manners

The following account is true. It was told to Esther by a fellow passenger as they waited to board their delayed flight to Brennan.

 

She always said yes. She never said no.

She’d go wherever you wanted to go,

She always was smiling and delighted to please,

She was kind and supportive, never mean or a tease.

She was faithful and loyal, the best kind of friend,

She’d toil and she’d labour if she thought she could mend

whatever had hurt you, smooth away any sore:

It was her mission in life to help those she adored.

 

Only her smiles and her gentleness came at a cost,

(No-one really knew just what others had lost),

Or the things she would ponder quite late in the night,

Or the plans she would hatch – which would give you a fright.

Or the secrets she kept buried out in the back yard,

Covered over with roses and marked with a shard

of sharp stony granite, so only she would know

just where she had buried that cat long ago.

 

It was a cute fluffball, her neighbours’ pride and joy,

It would gambol and frisk, think its tail was a toy,

It treated her garden like its own personal loo,

She was so sick of finding buried piles of cat poo.

She once tried to mention the poo to next door

But they’d smilingly shrugged and just totally ignored

their shit pooing monster that gambolled around,

So one evening she killed it and buried it deep in the ground.

 

Of course they were panicked and weeping and sad,

Had she seen their little loved one? Her garden was its pad.

Sadly no, she responded, but she’d keep her eyes peeled,

Her roses that year won a prize, her name on a shield.

Her neighbours soon moved and new folk did arrive,

They too had a cat which she hoped would survive

and not turn her garden into another cat’s loo

But then, if it did, her roses would bloom anew…